Native Command Queuing (NCQ) is a technology designed to increase performance of SATA hard disks under certain conditions by allowing the individual hard disk to internally optimize the order in which received read and write commands are executed. This can reduce the amount of unnecessary drive head movement, resulting in increased performance (and slightly decreased wear of the drive) for workloads where multiple simultaneous read/write requests are outstanding, most often occurring in server-type applications.

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NCQ allows the drive itself to determine the optimal order in which to retrieve outstanding requests. This may, as here, allow the drive to fulfill all requests in fewer rotations and thus less time.